Arizona Real Estate Notebook

Phoenix Arizona home prices fell 4.7% from January to February according to the Case-Shiller Home Price Index for Phoenix, Arizona. That was a large decline, however, more recent data from other sources suggests prices may have NOT fallen between March and April. We won’t know if the Case-Shiller data substantiates that until Case-Shiller’s April data [...]

“Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, On the one hand on the other.” –Harry Truman On the one hand… It looks like the median home price in metro Phoenix is bottoming out, at least temporarily. Let’s look at some of the evidence on the one hand and leave the other hand for [...]

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” —John Kenneth Galbraith

It may not be the final bottom but it certainly looks like a significant change in direction. It is likely the beginning of the end of falling home prices, although absolute bottom for the median home price may be many months out. In a typical year, higher median prices in the Spring are followed by [...]

I just updated the monthly home sale charts for 124 zip codes in the right hand column. For a brief analysis of the current Phoenix, Arizona real estate market, play the video below.

Holy Mackerel! This $8,000 first-time home buyer program is a spectacular deal for Arizona first-time home buyers. It’s better than I thought. You gotta watch the video. The tax credit is equal to 10 percent of the home’s purchase price up to a maximum of $8,000. Home purchase must close by December 1 – NOT [...]

Price (green line) The median price in metro Phoenix of single family homes sold via the MLS fell to $120,000 in March 2009. The median home price in Phoenix, Arizona hasn’t been that low since sometime in the 1990′s. I only have data back to January 2000. At $120,000, the median single family home price [...]

Below are selected bullets taken from Jeff Thredgold’s “TeaLeaf” economics blog. See the whole list at his website. • Between 1980 and 2007, total emissions of major air pollutants within the U.S. dropped by 52% • The number of people who have quit smoking (46 million) now exceeds the number who still smoke (45 million). [...]

A new white paper by Harvard’s Joshua Coval and Erik Stafford, and Princeton’s Jakub Jurek concludes that bank assets were mispriced before the meltdown and now are more accurately priced. “The analysis of this paper suggests that recent credit market prices are actually highly consistent with fundamentals. A structural framework confirms that bonds and credit [...]

This former senior bank regulator and S&L prosecutor, and current Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in the Treasury Secretary’s “stress test” of banks.

There were a couple of real estate booms in the 1970′s. The second one, I believe, was an inflation boom. People saw their incomes being eroded by inflation. Real estate prices, however, appreciated along with inflation. Real estate was seen as an investment that was “inflation-proof.” Big money flowed into real estate and prices boomed. [...]